Sony in Japan today officially announced Sony’s new Xperia Tablet Z tablet. The tablet is tipped to enter the Japanese market this spring and promises to be semi-rugged.

The tablet promises to be waterproof and dustproof while being impressively thin at 6.9 mm thick (thinner than the anorexic iPad mini). Sony also says the tablet is light at about 495 g. The Tablet Z will have a 10.1-inch screen sporting WUXGA resolution using the Mobile Bravia Engine 2 for high-quality images.

The new tablet will have an 8.1 megapixel camera using an Exmor R CMOS sensor. The fancy camera on the tablet is able to automatically recognize the scene and adjust exposures automatically so they come out with high quality in dark. The camera also has an Auto Low Premium feature that selects optimal settings automatically for the best images in dark environments.

The Xperia Tablet Z features S-Force Front Surround 3-D virtual sound technology, and has integrated Near Field Communication technology allowing users to share photos and video with other Xperia smartphone and tablet users at the touch of a button. This NFC transport feature can also be used to share music.

Other hardware features of the tablet include Android 4.1 and a quad-core 1.5 GHz processor. The tablet also has integrated LTE technology and will be available in black or white colors. Pricing is unannounced at this time.

Sony also recently revealed its gorgeous Xperia Z smartphone which features a 5” 1080p display.

Takin is no Tony, he's a PC gamer like me so he knows what he's talking about, he found lotsa quality games on iOS that are not on Android and I double checked them myself online to see if he was lying - guess what, he was right. Indeed Android has some decent stuff now ported from iOS but still, quite a lot is not ported and may never be ported, who knows. Hence looks like for home use iPad is the best, but Nexus 7 is probably better for small kids 'cause it's so cheap and not worth grieving if broken/eaten by/shewed on/poked on/stomped on by a kid

"Takin is no Tony, he's a PC gamer like me so he knows what he's talking about"

/facepalm... Too easy, so I'll skip it. =)

I am not saying there arent games on IOS that arent on Android, I was saying that Takin A) Puts too much emphasis on that when evaluating 2 platforms and B) Tends to try really hard to justify why Apple is better, even in cases where it isnt.

Pirks - Pretty much, I have no horse in this race. I've built my own high-end PCs for almost 20 years, my first tablet was a Kindle (I own the latest Kindle Paperwhite and it is AMAZING), I own every game console, I also own Macs for work, and I dual boot Linux on my PC for playing around with.

If I get something like an iOS device it is because of things I value: hardware performance and the best developer support.

I totally understand buying other mobile platforms because they are cheaper or have larger screens, that's great, but writing off iOS devices and its users as "iSheep" when that ecosystem is the best at certain things like applications and hardware is silly. Throw on the usual fanboy-forum reason of "hurr Apple" and yeah, its dumb.